Mountains of Stoneand The Winds of Change
are now available as Kindle e-books on Amazon. The Kindle edition of The
Winds of Change is not footnoted and does not contain the Western Trivia
chapter. The picture CD is not available with the Amazon books.

The thirteen of the sixteen Rocky Mountain Rendezvous
were held west of the Continental Divide. The 1829, 1830,
and 1838 rendezvous were held east of the Continental Divide. Six of the sixteen rendezvous were held in territory belonging to Mexico. Except
the 1826-27-28 rendezvous in Utah and the 1832 in Idaho,
all of the
rendezvous were held in Wyoming. Six of the sixteen rendezvous were held on
Horse Creek in the Green River Valley near present-day Daniel, Wyoming...there
was no rendezvous in 1831. All of the rendezvous were held in
the territory of the Shoshone, or Snake, Indians.

Mountain Man Rendezvous Sites

After the 1825
rendezvous, the next year's rendezvous site was selected during the rendezvous.
The selected sites were in a lush valley big enough for up to five hundred
mountain men, several thousand Indians, and grazing and water for thousands of
horses. Members of the Shoshone, Crow, Nez Perce, and Flathead nations attended
most of the rendezvous. Another consideration was the site be readily
accessible to the supply trains from St. Louis.

The rendezvous
campsites were grouped around the various suppliers. Depending on the number of
suppliers, the rendezvous sites could be spread out
for several miles; no one point can be
called the "site". When my brother Bert
Eddins and I took the
pictures of the rendezvous sites, we took
these factors into account. The longitudes and latitudes given represent
the probable center of the rendezvous.

James Beckwourth
left this general description of the mountain man's summer rendezvous.

It may well be
supposed that the arrival of such a vast amount of luxuries from the East did
not pass off without a general celebration. Mirth, song, dancing, shooting,
trading, running, jumping, singing, racing, target-shooting, yarns, frolic,
with all sort of extravagances that white men or Indians could invent were
freely indulged in. The unpacking of the medicine water contributed not a
little to the heightening of our festivities.

1825 Rendezvous:

1825 Burnt Fork, Wyoming
N41°
2' 33.1" W109°
59' 39.2"

July 1, 1825, on
Henry’s Fork of the Green River, Ashley wrote:

On the 1st day of july, all the men in my employ or with whom I had any concern in the country,
together with twenty-nine, who had recently withdrawn from the Hudson Bay
company, making in all 120 men, were assembled in two camps near each other
about 20 miles distant from the place appointed by me as a general rendezvous,
when it appeared that we had been scattered over the territory west of the
mountains in small detachments from the 38th to the 44th degree of latitude,
and the only injury we had sustained by Indian depredations was the stealing
of 17 horses by the Crows on the night of the 2nd april, as before mentioned,
and the loss of one man killed on the headwaters of the Rio Colorado, by a
party of Indians unknown.

Accompanied by
Jedediah Smith, Ashley left the day
after the gathering and took his furs over South Pass and down the Bighorn Canyon to near present-day Thermopolis, Wyoming. The furs were loaded into
bull boats and floated down the Bighorn
and Yellowstone rivers to the Missouri River where Ashley met the Atkinson-O'Fallon
Expedition.

Bull Boat - Google Images

General Henry Atkinson and Indian agent Benjamin O’Fallon had come up the Missouri in a paddle wheeler
to negotiate treaties with the Missouri River Indian tribes. Ashley's furs were
loaded on the Atkinson-O'Fallon paddle-wheeler and taken to St. Louis.

1826 Rendezvous:

1826 - 1831 Cove, Utah
N41°
57' 26" W111°
49' 37"

Jedediah Smith
and Robert Campbell left St. Louis in late October with sixty men, one
hundred and sixty mules, and twenty thousand dollars worth of trade goods.
Snowed in on the Republican Fork of the Kansas River, Smith sent a message for
Ashley to bring more mules; a third of Smith's mules had died. Ashley responded
with twenty-three more men and mules. When the combined party reached Green
River, Dr. Gowns states sixty to seventy trappers joined the caravan. From the
Green River Valley several routes have been proposed for the route to Cache
Valley, but most accounts have the caravan following Bear River into the north
end of Cache Valley.

The site of the 1826
rendezvous in Cache
Valley (Willow Valley) is disputed between Cove and Hyrum, Utah. The renowned
historian Dr. Dale Morgan believes it was near the mouth of Blacksmith Fork
Canyon near Hyrum. Dr.
Morgan
based this assumption on the July entries of Jedediah Smith's 1827 Journals.

July 1st 25 Miles North along the
shore of the Lake. Nothing material occurred.

[July] 2nd 20 Miles North East Made our
way to the Cache. But Just before arriving there I saw some indians on the
opposite side of a creek. It was hardly worth while as I thought, to be any
wise careful, so I went directly to them and found as near as I could judge by
what I knew of the language to be a band of the Snakes. I learned from them
that the Whites, as they term our parties, were all assembled at the little
Lake, a distance of about 25 Miles. There was in [the] this camp about 200
Lodges of indians and as the[y] were on their way to the rendevous I encamped
with them.

[July] 3d I hired a horse and a guide and
at three O Clock arrived at the rendezvous. My arrival caused a considerable
bustle in camp, for myself and party had been given up as lost. A small Cannon
brought up from St. Louis was loaded and fired for a salute.

Dr. Morgan took the term cache
to mean where goods from the 1826 rendezvous were cached. Dr. Morgan further
speculated Smith's direction of travel was up Box Elder Canyon and over
Sardine Pass. Based on these assumptions, he located the 1826 rendezvous in
the area of Hyrum, Utah. For me, there are several fallacies to these
assumptions. I will state four, and if anyone is interested, email me and
we can discuss several others.

1) From Dr. Morgan's Blacksmith Fork
location, it is approximately thirty-airline miles to Bear Lake. This
is steep rugged country and there is absolutely no way Smith, or anyone else,
could ride a horse up Blacksmith Fork Canyon and arrive at the south end of
Bear Lake (Sweet Lake) by three o'clock in the afternoon...present-day dirt road
is approximately
forty-five miles. Smith's own words of
the third would indicate the cache was somewhere else. The most likely
place is John H. Weber's winter camp near Cove, Utah.

2) If Indians were traveling with their families, the trail had to be wide
enough to pull at least a three to four foot wide travois, and this would be difficult,
if not impossible, up
Blacksmith Fork Canon.

3) The main Indian trail from Cache Valley
to Bear Lake was up Indian Canyon to present-day Tony's Grove in the upper end of Logan Canyon. At
this point, there would have been a relatively easy trail to Bear Lake.
Indian Canyon is just south of Weber's camp site.
From Weber's camp at Cove, it is twenty-six-airline miles to Bear Lake.

4) If the 1826 rendezvous trade
goods caravan entered the north end of Cache Valley, it had to stop at or
close by John Weber's winter camp at Cove, Utah. The trip from St. Louis had
been a long hard journey; up to thirty men had deserted. My question is why
would the men re-pack the mules and leave a well-known, establish camp and
travel another twenty-five miles south to Blacksmith Fork Canyon?

There has been
considerable discussion on the location of the 1826 rendezvous on this site.
Despite all the speculation, including mine, there is only one known fact and
that is from Jedediah Smith's journal...
I hired a horse and a guide and at three O Clock arrived at the rendezvous. Blacksmith Fork Canyon contains a fast running stream and any trail up the
canyon would have had to be on the sides of the canyon. No one can ride a
horse from the mouth of Blacksmith Fork Canyon and arrive on the southend of
Bear Lake, or at the site suggested by Covington a few miles south of Bear Lake,
by three o'clock in the afternoon. As soon as someone does this please let me know and
I will gladly make the appropriate changes.

At the conclusion of the 1826
Willow Valley rendezvous, Ashley met with Jedediah Smith, David Jackson, and
William Sublette on Bear River between present-day Georgetown and Soda Springs, Idaho.
Ashley sold his interest in the Ashley Smith Fur Trade Company to the new
company of Smith Jackson and Sublette. The previous year, he had taken Jedediah Smith as his
new partner;
Andrew Henry left the Ashley-Henry partnership in 1824.

Ashley had made enough money from the
Rocky Mountain fur trade to quit and pursue his interests in politics.
General Ashley remained as the
rendezvous supplier for the new firm of Smith Jackson and Sublette, but he hired
men to take the supplies to the rendezvous.

1827 - 1828 Rendezvous:

1827–1828 Sweet Lake Rendezvous
N41°
49' 31.7" W111°
19' 46.3"

Ashley's hired
Hyrum Scott and forty-six men to take the 1827 supply caravan to the Sweet Lake (Bear Lake)
rendezvous near present-day Laketown, Utah.
The trade goods sent out this year by Ashley is the first listing of
alcohol
(Rum) being sent, but there are reports of it at the two previous rendezvous. With the caravan was a small cannon mounted on two wheels. This
two-wheeled cart made the first wheeled tracks over South Pass. On the way back
with the furs, Hiram Scott become ill, and was later abandoned. His body was
found three years later near Scott's Bluff, Nebraska.

There were few trade
goods for the 1828 rendezvous on Sweet Lake. Sublette had brought
out the trade goods the previous fall, and they were pretty much gone. Joshua Pilcher
arrived with a few goods from a cache of the previous year...the Pilcher,
Lucien Fontenelle, Andrew Drips, Charles Bent, and H. H. Vanderburgh Company had brought trade goods out the previous year.
But, Crow Indians stole their
horses near South Pass, and they had to cache the trade goods.

In both the 1827 and
1828 rendezvous, there were fights with the Blackfeet near the rendezvous
sites. There were no trappers killed in the first battle, but Lewis Boldue was
killed in the 1828 fight.

1829 Rendezvous:

1829 – Lander, Wyoming
N42° 51' 06.4" W108° 41' 45.5"

1829 rendezvous on the
Popo Agie (Popoasia, Little Wind River) north of Lander, Wyoming was the first
rendezvous to be held east of the Continental Divide. There was a small gathering of
mountain men on the Popo Agie, and as soon
as the trading was concluded, Sublette left with the remaining trade goods to
find his partners, Jedediah Smith and David Jackson. Sublette traveled over
Togwotee Pass into Jackson Hole and then over Teton Pass into Pierre's Hole.
There he found Jedediah Smith, who had been in the Oregon
Country for two years, and David Jackson. Robert Newell recorded there was one hundred and seventy-five mountain
men at this second rendezvous. The 1829 Rendezvous is sometimes referred to as a split rendezvous.

1830 Rendezvous:

1830 – 1838 Riverton, Wyoming
N43°
0' 44.7" W108°
21' 39.2"

The 1830 supply
caravan, led by William
Sublette, consisted of eighty-one men on mules, ten wagons drawn by five mules each,
two Deerborn carriages, twelve head of cattle, and a milk cow. Sublette left St.
Louis on April 10th and arrived in the Wind River Basin on July 16th. The supply
caravan averaged fifteen- to twenty-five miles a day.
Sublette stopped for a rest on July
4th, 1830 at a large rock outcropping on the Sweetwater River. Sublette named
the rock Independence Rock.

The Smith Jackson and
Sublette firm collected one hundred and seventy
packs of furs with a value of
eighty-four thousand four hundred and ninety-nine dollars. This was the firm's
most profitable year, but the partners had concerns over the future viability of
the fur trade. At the Riverton rendezvous of 1830, Smith Jackson and Sublette
sold out to a partnership of Thomas Fitzpatrick,
James Bridger, Milton Sublette,
Henry Fraeb, and Jean Gervias. William Sublette remained the St. Louis supplier for
the new Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

Fitzpatrick, Bridger,
Sublette, Fraeb, and Gervias named the new company the
Rocky Mountain Fur
Company. Although the term Rocky Mountain Fur Company is widely used in fur
trade history, the period from 1830 to 1833 is the only time there was an
actual company named the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

Word of Caution: If
you are looking for the
1830 and 1838 rendezvous site, it is just south of Monroe Street in the
southeast corner of Riverton, Wyoming. The map in Dr. Gowans' book, Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, shows
the site on the Wind River several miles northeast of Riverton.

1831 - No Rendezvous

Thomas
Fitzpatrick had gone to St. Louis after supplies, but Jedediah Smith, David Jackson, and
William Sublette had left for Santa Fe...Comanche
killed Jedediah Smith on the Cimarron
River. After outfitting Fitzpatrick in Santa Fe, Sublette and Jackson dissolved
their partnership. Jackson went to California, and Sublette returned to St.
Louis.

Henry Fraeb met
Fitzpatrick east of South Pass and took the supplies to Willow Valley. He
distributed the supplies out to the various camps from there.
Fitzpatrick headed for St. Louis to make sure the next year's supplies arrived on
time.

1832 Rendezvous:

1832
Pierre's Hole, Idaho
N43° 46' 25" W111° 10' 20"

Sublette and Campbell were the main suppliers to the 1832 rendezvous,
which was held in Pierre's Hole a valley below and west of the Tetons. When William Sublette renewed his fur trade license,
he was allowed four hundred and fifty
gallons of whiskey for his boatmen,
but was compelled to
post a bond not to sell whiskey to the Indians. The route Sublette used
to the Pierre’s Hole rendezvous did not require the use of a single boatman.

Mountain men from several different companies attended the rendezvous in Pierre's Hole: Rocky
Mountain Fur Company, American Fur Company, plus
independent companies such as Bean and Sinclair, Gant and Blackwell, and Nathaniel Wyeth...Dr.
Gowans places the main encampment of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company a little
ways upstream from where Highway 33 crosses over Teton Creek on the south end of
Driggs, Idaho.

The Pierre's Hole rendezvous was
one of the largest rendezvous held in the Rocky Mountains. Mountain Man
and Indian camps extended north from Darby Creek along the west side of the
Teton Mountains to Tetonia, Idaho...an area of seven square miles, or more. It
is estimated there were four hundred mountain men, one hundred and eight lodges
of Nez Perce, eighty lodges of Flatheads, and over three thousand horses. Camps
had to be spread out to keep the
various mountain man and Indian horse herds separated.

Joe Meek left this description:

All the parties were now safely
in. The lovely mountain valley was populous with the different camps. The Rocky
Mountain and American companies had their separate camps; Wyeth had his; a
company of free trappers, fifteen, led by a man named Sinclair from Arkansas had
the fourth; the Nez Perce and Flatheads, the allies of the Rocky Mountain
company and the friends of the whites, had their lodges along all the streams;
so that all together there could not have been less than one thousand
souls, and two or three thousand horses and mules gathered in the place.

The most significant
occurrence at the 1832 rendezvous was the Battle of Pierre's Hole. This was the
largest engagement between the mountain men and hostile Indians in the Rocky
Mountains. Dr. Fred Gowans located the Battle of Pierre's Hole in the marshy area near the junction of
Fox Creek and the Teton River ~N43° 39' 3.1" W111° 10' 16".

Most journals
refer to the Indians as being Blackfeet, but they were Gros Ventre. It should also be pointed out the Gros Ventre
belonged to the Atsina Nation, as did the Arapaho, and were not part of the Blackfeet Nation as is often
stated.

There is a wide discrepancy in the written accounts associated with the Battle of
Pierre's Hole. Captain
Bonneville was not an eyewitness to the battle, but his information came
from two of the main participants, William Sublette and Robert Campbell. A few
weeks after the Battle of Pierre's Hole, Campbell recorded
in his journal:

On the trip going out we
[Sublette and Campbell] had passed Captain Bonneville and his party on the Blue,
and as we were coming back we passed him on the Green river and gave him an
account of our fight with the Blackfeet.

Bonneville's account of the battle is the generally accepted one. The following is an
edited version taken from The Adventures of Captain Bonneville by Washington Irving
published in 1837.

On the 17th of July, a small
brigade of fourteen trappers, led by Milton Sublette, brother of the captain,
set out with the intention of proceeding to the southwest. They were
accompanied by Sinclair and his fifteen free trappers, and Nathaniel Wyeth and
his men. On the first day, they proceeded
about eight miles to the southeast, and encamped for the night. On the following morning, just as they were raising
their camp, they observed a long line of people pouring down a defile of the
mountains. They at first supposed them to be Fontenelle and his party, whose
arrival had been daily expected. Wyeth, however, reconnoitered them with a
spy-glass, and soon perceived they were Indians.

Two trappers of
Sublette's brigade, a half-breed named Antoine Godin and
a Flathead Indian rode towards the Indians. The Blackfeet
halted and one of the chiefs advanced unarmed, bearing the
pipe of peace. Godin and the Flathead met the Blackfoot chief
half way. When the chief extended his hand in friendship, Antoine grasped it,
and the Flathead leveled his piece
and fired. Antoine snatched the chief's scarlet
blanket and galloped off with it as a trophy to the camp.

The Indians immediately threw
themselves into the edge of a swamp, among willows and cottonwood trees,
interwoven with vines. Here they began to fortify themselves; the women
digging a trench, and throwing up a breastwork of logs and branches. In the
meantime, an express had been sent off to the rendezvous for reinforcements.

Captain Sublette, and his
associate, Campbell, were at their camp when the express came galloping across
the plain. Every one turned out with horse and rifle. The Nez Perces and
Flatheads joined. As fast as a horseman could arm and mount he galloped off; the
valley was soon alive with white men and red men scouring at full speed.

As Sublette approached the
Indian fort, he perceived an Indian peeping through an
aperture. Sublette fired and the ball
struck the savage in the eye. While he was reloading, he called to Campbell,
and pointed out to him the hole; "Watch that place," said he, "and you will
soon have a fair chance for a shot." Scarce had he uttered the words, when a
ball struck him in the shoulder, and almost wheeled him around. Campbell took him in his
arms and carried him out of the thicket. The same shot that struck Sublette
wounded another man in the head.

At one time it was resolved to
set fire to the Indian's fort; and the squaws belonging to the allies were employed to
collect combustibles. This however, was abandoned; the Nez Perces being
unwilling to destroy the robes and blankets, and other spoils of the enemy,
which they felt sure would fall into their hands. During one of the pauses of the
battle, a Blackfeet chief cried out:

There are four hundred
lodges of our brethren at hand. They will soon be here--their arms are
strong—their hearts are big--they will avenge us!

After this speech was translated two
or three times by Nez Perce and creole interpreters, and then
rendered into English, the chief was reported to have said four hundred lodges of
his tribe were attacking the encampment at the other end of the valley. A party was left to
keep watch the fort; the rest galloped off to the camp. The next morning
when their companions returned from the rendezvous with the report all was safe, they advanced towards the fort without opposition. The fort had been abandoned
during the night. The bodies of ten Indians were found within the
fort; among them the one shot in the eye by Sublette. The Blackfeet afterward reported
they had lost twenty-six warriors in this battle.

Five white men and one half
breed were killed, and several wounded. Seven of the Nez Perces were also
killed, and six wounded.

Dr. Gowans' book,
Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, gives five different eye witness accounts of
the Battle of Pierre's Hole: Warren Ferris, George Nidever, Joe Meek,
Nathaniel Wyeth, and Zenas Leonard...clerk
for Joseph Walker. These chroniclers vary to such a degree it makes you wonder if
it was the same battle. The journals do not even agree on how many were
killed. Of
the five eyewitness accounts, the cowardly act of Antoine Godin appears in
Meek's account and a distorted version in Nidevers. The other writers do not
mention it at all. It should be pointed out
these mountain man journals, with the exception of Leonard and the Adventure
of Captain Bonneville, were written many years after the mountain
man-writer left the mountains.

A new book on the battle of Pierre's Hole was published
in 2010.Pierre's Hole! The Fur Trade
History of Teton Valley by Jim Hardee. Jim is the editor of the
Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Journal and director of the Fur Trade Research
Center. Published by the Sublette County Historical Society and the Museum of
the Mountain Man, Pierre's Hole! is an excellent source of information on
the Rocky Mountain fur trade associated with the Teton Valley and the upper
Snake River plains. Jim's detailed research uncovered several unpublished
accounts of the 1832 Pierre's Hole Rendezvous. Pierre's Hole is
available online at the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale,
www.MuseumoftheMountainMan.com .

Not long after the
Battle of Pierre's Hole, July 24th, 1832, Captain Benjamin L. E.
Bonneville and
Joseph
R. Walker led one hundred and ten men with twenty wagons over South Pass into the Green River Valley. These were the first wagons to
cross South Pass on what would be the Mormon Trail and the Oregon-California Trail.

1833 Rendezvous:

1833, 1835, 1836, 1837, 1839, 1840 – Daniel, Wyoming
N42°
51' 42" W110°
9' .05"
The Rocky Mountain Fur Company,
Fontenelle and Drips of the American Fur Company, Bonneville and Walker, and the newly formed St.
Louis Company of William Sublette and Robert Campbell were at the 1833
Horse Creek rendezvous. Campbell had brought out the yearly supplies along with forty
to fifty men, including Sir William Drummond Stewart, Charles Larpenteur, Edmund
Christy and Ben Harrison. Harrison was the son of William H. Harrison, who was soon to be
President of the United States. William Stewart, a wealthy Scotsman, made several
trips to the Rocky Mountains. Ben Harrison was sent west by his father
to cure his son's drinking problem.

Bonneville and Walker were
camped in the location of their 1832 camp. The American Fur Company camped
at the
junction of Green River and Horse Creek. The Rocky Mountain Fur Company
camped on the Green River five miles below the American Fur Company. These three
camps were spread out over the Green River over ten miles.

A
new company called the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and
Christy was formed at the 1833 rendezvous. The new company, organized on July 20th, was to operate
for one year.
Edmund Christy had invested six thousand six hundred and seven dollars in the
Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

A highlight of the 1833 rendezvous
was the following incident from Joe Meek (Victor).

During the indulgence of these
excesses, while at this rendezvous, there occurred one of those incidents of
wilderness life which make the blood creep with horror. Twelve of the men were
bitten by a mad wolf, which hung about the camp for two or three nights. Two of
these were seized with madness in camp, sometime afterwards, and ran off into
the mountains, where they perished. One was attacked by the paroxysm while on a
hunt; when, throwing himself off his horse, he struggled and foamed at the
mouth, gnashing his teeth, and barking like a wolf. Yet he retained
consciousness enough to warn away his companions, who hastened in search of
assistance; but when they returned he was nowhere to be found. It was thought
that he was seen a day or two afterwards, but no one could come up with him, and
of course, he too, perished. Another died on his journey to St. Louis; and
several died at different times within the next two years.

At the time, however, immediately
following the visit of the wolf to camp, Captain Stuart [Stewart] was
admonishing Meek on the folly of his ways, telling him that the wolf might
easily have bitten him, he was so drunk. "It
would have killed him,--sure, if it hadn't cured him! " said Meek,--alluding to
the belief that alcohol is a remedy for the poison of hydrophobia.

After the rendezvous broke up,
Thomas Fitzpatrick and Milton
Sublette entered an agreement with Nathaniel Wyeth to bring the supplies
for the 1834 rendezvous.

1834 Rendezvous:

1834 Granger, Wyoming
N41°
35' 14.3" W109°
58' 35.9"

Nathaniel Wyeth left Independence on April 28, 1834.
The trade caravan consisted of
Milton Sublette, a Methodist minister, Jason Lee, two naturalists, Thomas
Nuttall and Kirk Townsend, seventy-five men, and two hundred and fifty horses.

William
Sublette heard of the arrangement between Fitzpatrick and Wyeth to furnish
supplies for the 1834 rendezvous a
few days later. Sublette assembled his supply train, and when he caught up with
Wyeth, Sublette and passed Wyeth's supply caravan
during the night. When Sublette reached Laramie Creek near where it empties into
the North Platte River, he left several men to
start construction on a fur trade post (Fort William - Fort John - Fort Laramie).

At the rendezvous, William Sublette
forced Fitzpatrick to buy the rendezvous supplies from him; Sublette held unpaid notes on the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.
When Wyeth arrived a few days later, he noted:

...and much to my astonishment
the goods which I had contracted to bring to the Rocky Mountain Fur Co. were
refused by these honorable gentlemen.

Suppliers at the 1834 rendezvous
were the American Fur Company, Sublette and Campbell, and Nathaniel Wyeth. The
American Fur Company was camped near the junction of Ham's Fork and Blacks Fork
where the above picture was taken. Sublette and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company
were five to ten miles up Ham's Fork and Wyeth was another five or so miles
above them.

After the rendezvous, a disgruntled Wyeth took his
supplies to the Portneuf River near its junction with Snake River and built
Fort
Hall. Wyeth sold Fort Hall to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1837.

At the end of the 1834
rendezvous on Ham's Fork, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company was dissolved and a new company
Fontenelle and Fitzpatrick emerged. A year later, William Sublette sold Fort
William to the Fontenelle and Fitzpatrick partnership and agreed
to leave the mountains. Thus 1835 ended the major influence of
the "Ashley men” on the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade.

This same year
(1835), Jacob Astor ended his fur trade career with the selling of
his holdings in the western department of the American Fur Company to Pratte,
Chouteau and Company of St. Louis. Pratte, Chouteau and Company was now
the chief supplier for what was left of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. The remaining portion of
Astor's fur trade company was bought by Ramsey Crooks. Operating on the Upper Missouri
and the Great Lakes area, Crooks retained the name American Fur Company.

Accompanying Lucien Fontenelle
with the 1835 supply train was two missionaries, Dr. Marcus Whitman and Samuel
Parker. During the rendezvous, Dr. Whitman removed a metal arrowhead from Jim
Bridger’s back. Bridger had been shot three years before in the Blackfeet
country. The Nez Perce at the rendezvous were so receptive to having
missionaries among them that Dr. Whitman returned to the East to recruit more
missionaries.

Samuel Parker left a description
on the plight of the mountain man.

The American Fur Company have
between two and three hundred men constantly in and about the mountains
engaged in trading, hunting and trapping. These all assemble at rendezvous
upon the arrival of the caravan, bring in their furs and take new supplies for
the coming year, of clothing ammunition and goods for trade with the Indians.
But few of these men ever return to their country and friends. Most of them
are constantly in debt to the company, and are unwilling to return without a
fortune, and year after year pass away while they are hoping in vain for
better success.

On the way to the Oregon mission with their husbands Dr.
Marcus
Whitman and Henry Spalding, Narcissa Whitman and Elisa Spaulding were the first white women to attend a
mountain man rendezvous and
to cross South Pass on what would become the Oregon Trail. At the conclusion of the rendezvous,
the missionaries were escorted to Walla Walla by a Hudson's Bay caravan under
the leadership of Thomas McKay and
John McLeod. McKay's father, Alexander McKay, was with
Alexander Mackenzie on his crossing to the
Pacific Ocean in 1793, and a partner in the Pacific Fur Company. Alexander McKay was killed
on the Tonquin
at Nootka Sound.

Accompanying Thomas Fitzpatrick
with the supply train of 1837 were Etienne Provost, Sir William Drummond
Stewart, and a young artist, Alfred Jacob Miller. Stewart had brought Miller to
capture on canvas the activities of the rendezvous. Stewart later took Alfred
Miller to Scotland where he painted large murals based on the sketches he
had made in the mountains. During the sixteen-year history of the rendezvous,
neither mountain man, traveler, missionary, or visitor left a more detailed
description of the wilderness experience than did Alfred Jacob Miller (Gowans).

Andrew Drips was in charge of the
1838 supply train, accompanying him was August Johann Sutter. Sutter went on to
California and built Sutter's Fort where gold was discovered in 1849. Drips was
also accompanied by a large group of missionaries headed for Oregon and Sir
William Drummond. Stewart was making his last visit to the mountains before
returning to Scotland. The 1838 rendezvous is one of the best documented
rendezvous; four missionary wives kept diaries.

The 1838 rendezvous was scheduled for the Green
River Valley, but to escape trading pressure from the Hudson's Bay Company, the
location was moved to the site of the 1830 rendezvous on the Wind River. This
note was written with charcoal on an old
storehouse door:

Come to Popoasia
on Wind River and you will find plenty trade, whiskey, and white women.

According to Jerome Peltier (Mountain Man and the
Fur Trade Series), Moses "Black" Harris wrote this note. A frequent
companion of William Sublette, Harris has been described on several internet sites as a black man, but
there is no evidence to support this other than his nickname "Black". This description of Harris was left by Alfred Jacob Miller:

This Black Harris always created a sensation at the
campfire, being a capital raconteur, and having had as many perilous adventures
as an man probably in the mountains. He was wiry form, made up of bone and
muscle , with a face apparently composed of tan leather and whip cord, finished
off with a peculiar blue-black tint, as if gunpowder had been burnt into his
face.

According to Robert Newell, the
company men were hard nosed in regards to business at the
rendezvous. Prices were extremely high and some trappers slipped away from
the rendezvous because they could not pay their debts. Credit was a
thing of the past.

The only account of the 1839
rendezvous is in the journal of Dr. Frederick A. Wislizenus, a German physician.
Moses Harris led the train with only nine helpers...a far cry from
Sublette's train to the 1830
rendezvous.

Andrew Drips, Jim Bridger, and Henry Fraeb
led the caravan for the 1840 Rendezvous. Leaving
Westport on April 30th, 1840, it was the last fur trade caravan to the
Rocky Mountains. With Drips was Father Pierre De Smet and the family of Joel
Walker, brother of Joseph R. Walker. Joel and Mary Walker with their
five children were the first family to travel the Oregon Trail with the intent
of farming the land.

Doc Newell, Joe Meek, and Bill Craig accompanied
Joel Walker to the Oregon Country. Meek and Craig were with the Joseph
Walker in
1833 when his party crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains into California.

Several factors
brought an end to the Rocky Mountain fur trade era:

1) By 1834, men hat
fashion had turned from beaver to silk hats producing a drastic effect in the
price of beaver. In the early 1830's, beaver was worth almost $6/lb in
Philadelphia; by 1843 the price was not even $3/lb.

2) Profit margins for the St. Louis trading firms did
not justify the expense and risk of taking supplies to the rendezvous sites.

3) Nutria (coypu)
from South America was as good as beaver for making felt hats and much cheaper
to obtain.

4) In the Rocky Mountains, the
relentless competition of the late 1820s and early 1830s destroyed the beaver
reserves, first in the accessible areas of the central Rockies, then
progressively outward from this core into the southern and northern Rockies.
David Wishart The Fur Trade of the American West 1907‑1840 stated that no other factor, even the collapse of the market after 1834, had a greater
influence on the decline of the Rocky Mountain Trapping System than this blind
destruction of the fur-bearing animals.

There is a tendency to think the beaver fur trade
ended with the collapse of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, but fourteen years
later, Hudson's Bay auctioned off five hundred thousand beaver pelts in London.
Hudson’s Bay Company records show from 1853 to 1877 the company sold some
three million beaver pelts.

The
typical trapper
left the mountains with just about what he started with...nothing. The early fur trade company
owners and the St. Louis suppliers reaped any profits from the fur trade.
The typical trapper never got
out of debt.

With the end of the Mountain Man-Indian Fur Trade
in the Rocky Mountains, the emphasis shifted to the Indian buffalo robe trade.
In 1840 the American Fur Company sent sixty-seven thousand buffalo robes to St.
Louis, and in 1848, one hundred and ten thousand robes and other skins along
with twenty-five thousand buffalo tongues and great quantities of tallow.

The demise of the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous system
signaled a new way of life for the Mountain
Man. A. B. Guthrie, Jr., in The Big Sky expressed it well:

This was the way to live, free
and easy, with time all a man's own and none to say no to him. A body got so's
he felt everything was kin to him, the earth and sky and buffalo and beaver
and the yellow moon at night. It was better than being walled in by a house,
better than breathing spoiled air and feeling caged like a varmint.

The Rendezvous Site article was written by
O. Ned Eddins
of Afton, Wyoming. Permission is given for material from this site to
be used for school research papers.

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Lavender, David. The
Fist in the Wilderness. Bison Books. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln,
Nebraska. 1964.

Mackenzie,
Alexander. Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Laurence, through the
Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in the Years 1789
and 1793. London, England: T. Cadell, 1801.